The Reverberate Hills; or The Apotheosis of the Narwhal

27 October 2026

any day now, again

(Douglas Tilden's The Tired Boxer: you & me both, bro)

Wow, the new computer set-up is all much, much more time-consuming & irritating than even I thought it would be! I'm still having troubles: the mouse doesn't work (is it another faulty piece of equipment, like the first laptop they sent me, or did I misread the inexplicable stick figures that pass for "instructions"), the photography set-up is, um, odd, the screen is too small for me to see (yes, I know I can enlarge the font), but an on-going theme here is that you have to hunt & peck & guess at these things, & anything you touch could turn out to be the very thing you did not want to touch. Feh! I won't even start on the tech companies; my generalized loathing of them has not been eased by my recent experiences. They keep wanting to sell me more products & services that I don't need when I really just want the ones I've already overpaid for to work. Big Tech now has the annoying tendency to insist that I can only operate under various "accounts", even if it means taking over an identity I've already created & giving me a new ID that requires new passcodes &c which I don't have because I didn't set them up. And no, I don't want to receive texts from you, faceless tech company,for the rest of my life. And you can't just block them, as someday you may need to hear from them, with more of those codes &c to get access. Underlying all this, of course, is the classic trope of "cranky old person who doesn't understand technology". It's inaccurate: I'm a cranky old person who has enough experience with technology to figure things out, eventually, but to be wary & annoyed while I do so. Arguably, in fact, people my age are more adept at tech than younger people: anyone starting out now in computers knows he/she/they should learn the MS Office Suite, & a few other things. When I was starting my working life, it was the Wild Wild West & I had to learn multiple systems quickly, & unlike today's systems they did not have a basic set-up in place (so that for instance someone now looking for a copy function has a pretty good idea of where to look). In fact for about half of the 1980s I worked at a publishing house where they would throw me on to various desktop publishing systems, have me learn them ASAP (let me revert to office lingo), & then teach them to others, & assist them, all while also having to meet actual deadlines on real projects, often ones that had been messed up by people paid more than I was This would have been great if they had made it clear what was going on; instead I had the feeling I was thrown into systems & then yanked off them just as soon as I was beginning to figure them out, while my manager sniped at me for . . . well, anything that came into his mind. But complaints about terrible managers, especially ones long ago & far away, are not really the path I want to travel down here. I plan to start posting again soon, though possibly without photographs. I can always go back & add some later. In fact I always go back & tweak my posts anyway.

In short: new opinions, or old ones repurposed, coming soon; deepest thanks to those who have been checking in. Some day I'll get all this figured out, just like life.

08 October 2026

any day now

My computer died on Labor Day weekend. It was sudden but not unexpected. It was showing signs, warning signs, but of course I put off dealing with it because of a general lack of time, energy, & money; also, I hate hate HATE dealing with things like this. I just want things to work, & to keep on working. The obvious & inevitable result of my ostrich-with-his-head-in-the-sand behavior was that I was forced to deal with it, on an inconvenient timeline that was not one I picked. And the whole thing has not gone well! Obviously nothing can be simple or easy or even work the way it's supposed to. I bought a replacement, then had to send it back as it was defective, then . . . well, look, I'm not interested in this stuff, why should you be?

People of course have been offering advice, which is mostly even more useless than most advice, &, what's worse, reactions of envy, as I've been freed from the suffocating embrace of our current world, &, well, NO. I still have to do the same things, they're just more difficult to get done. Yes, I survived for decades without a computer, but the infrastructure that was in place – the newspapers, magazines, phone directories, maps, box offices, &c, that could answer questions such as "when does the show start?" or "where is the venue?" – have all mostly migrated online. I've been staying abreast, at least of email, just barely, with a public-use computer, & I'm glad I have that resource, but there are drawbacks, such as other people: there is a regular user of these computers who can turn a single lozenge into an entire percussion section. I've never heard anything like it. Then there's the person who comes in to watch Fox, whom I have to remind, every single time, that he's supposed to use headphones. Not an atmosphere conducive to writing up performances, or doing much of anything else but catching up with email & then getting out.

Presumably my new system will be up & running in a few days (of course, I've been thinking that for days now. . . ). Then I have to figure out how to do the things I was used to do on my old system. We have our little shortcuts, we fall into our grooves, & now I have to re-plough those grooves in my digital earth.

Anyway: back soon with the usual fare, I hope. Thanks to those who have been checking; much love to you! And I hope to see you soon in our usual digital realms.